Hours to Decimal Chart

Quarter hours, from 0:00 through 12:00

Most timesheets land on a quarter hour. The first chart walks clock time in 15-minute steps. The decimal is hours plus minutes divided by 60, shown to two places. On the hour the decimal matches the clock hour: 8:00 is 8.00. A quarter past is .25, half past is .50, and a quarter to the next hour is .75. So 8:15 is 8.25, 8:30 is 8.50, and 8:45 is 8.75. Highlighted rows are the top of each hour, which makes the .00 line easy to find when you are scanning.

Twelve hours is included as 12:00 = 12.00. The chart stops there because a longer shift is the same fraction with a larger whole hour. Thirteen hours and fifteen minutes is 13.25, using the same .25 you see on 1:15. You do not need a second table for the afternoon. If the shift is 7:30 to 4:00 with a half-hour lunch already removed, convert each piece or, faster, type the net hours into the hours to decimal calculator. The chart is the lookup. The calculator is the arithmetic.

Minutes 0 through 59

The second chart is one hour, broken into minutes. It is the same minute table as the home page, repeated here so a chart query does not have to hunt for it. Two columns show two-place payroll decimals and four-place values. One minute is 0.02 if you only keep hundredths, and 0.0167 if you keep four places. That gap is why a week of one-minute remainders should be summed before it is rounded. Rows for 6, 15, 30, and 45 minutes are marked: 0.10, 0.25, 0.50, and 0.75. On a phone, scroll the page through the rows. If the four-place column is wider than the screen, scroll the table sideways.

Minutes alone, without an hour beside them, also have a converter on minutes to decimal hours. The forward write-up of the formula is hours and minutes to decimal. The reverse, 8.75 back to 8:45, is decimal hours to hours and minutes. Payroll’s reason for storing the decimal at all is hours to decimal payroll.

Using the chart before overtime

Convert the day, add the days, then apply overtime. The chart does not know which hours were past 40. After the week is a decimal, the overtime calculator splits it at 40 hours and prices the rest at 1.5 times. A block you already know is overtime goes to the time and a half calculator. Neither chart uploads what you read off it. They are reference tables, not a record of your timesheet.

Minute by minute

Use this table when the time is not a quarter hour. Find the minutes in the first column. Read two places for a typical timesheet and four places when you are about to add several small remainders.